As some of you might know, the Walker Art Center is a local partner, with the Unconvention, in Creative Time’s presentation of Sharon Hayes’ participatory performance project, Revolutionary Love 2: I am your best fantasy, which will take place at the State Capitol Grounds at the Republican National Convention in St. Paul on September 1, 2008. To organize this mass-effort, Sharon has made several trips to the Twin Cities to get to know our community and has been in contact with many of the individuals who have volunteered to participate in her performance. The conversations have been both insightful and inspiring. Sharon recently sent an email to people who have shown an interest in her project. I’m pleased to share this correspondence with you and encourage you to join us in this exercise of free speech, political and gender equality, and love.

Hi there. I’m Sharon Hayes.

Thank you for your beginning interest.

It is strange to be working in a city that is not my own, inviting people, from afar, to come out onto the street with me and speak a text that I’m writing. I hope that this letter will begin a conversation between me and you all and hopefully, begin to explain where I am coming from in this work:

The piece is a two-part piece that will take place in Denver, Wednesday, August 25th on the occasion of the DNC (the Democratic National Convention) and in St. Paul, Monday, September 1st on the occasion of the RNC (the Republican National Convention).

I am inviting 75-100 people to come out onto the street and to speak an 8-12 minute text in unison. The text will be written by me and will address gay power, gay liberation, love and politics. I am asking people to “ dress their best” in the style of dressing up for Pride, dressing your most queer, your most outrageous, your most yourself.

This particular project comes, in part, out of the work that I’ve been doing recently. [See my website, www.shaze.info for more information. In particular, the two projects: Everything Else Has Failed! Don’t You Think It’s Time for Love? and I March in the Parade of Liberty but as Long as I Love You I’m Not Free.] In this recent work, I stood on the street in New York City and spoke a love letter to an anonymous “ you.” I stand on the street, in one piece, with a microphone and a small amplifier and, in the other piece, with a bullhorn. I look like I’m doing “ public speech” but I’m speaking to a lover who I’ve been separated from for some reason that the texts don’t quite explain. While I’m talking about love and desire, I am also bringing up the war and the way in which the war interrupts and doesn’t interrupt our daily lives, our activities, our desires, our love. For me, this work attempts to speak about certain intersections between love and politics that aren’t so often talked about.

It is a similarly complicated intersection between love and politics that I’m interested in in the piece I’m hoping you’ll be apart of.

In November 2007, MIX, the experimental queer film festival in New York City, asked me to put sound to 33 minutes of silent footage of the 1971 Christopher Street Liberation Day Parade and Gay-In. The footage was shot by the Women’s Liberation Cinema, a group that included Kate Millet, Susan Kleckner, Robin Mide, Lenore Bode and others, but it had never been cut into a film. Kate Millet still lives in New York and I contacted her and asked her if I could record her commenting on the footage she and the WLC shot over 30 years ago. The footage is familiar in many ways, a band of queer people walking together up a street, strutting, hugging each other, blowing kisses to the camera. But it was also very interesting to see the scene through Kate’s eyes. At one point she said, “ It was a very different parade then, in those days. I mean we were very afraid. We didn’t know what would happen to us.” They didn’t know if they would make it to Central Park, she said.

And I found myself thinking about “ Gay Power.”

It was reported that people in the crowd outside of Stonewall started yelling “ Gay Power”…taking up the language of resistance used in the Black Power movement. Weeks after the riots in June 1969, a group of activists came together as the group, Gay Liberation Front, describing themselves as “ a militant coalition of radical and revolutionary homosexual men and women committed to fight the oppression of the homosexual as a minority group and to demand the right to self-determination of our own bodies.” In the name Gay Liberation Front, the group aligned themselves not only with active liberation struggles inside the U.S. but also with the national liberation front in Vietnam. Gay Liberation began in the midst of the Vietnam War.

I always thought of “ Gay Power” as being about visibility and in that, it always seems a little “ power-lite”. I didn’t think about it in terms of the “ power” of Black Power or liberation movements, I saw it as pride and in that it seemed useful for the day but perhaps not too much longer. Black Power seemed to have teeth, Gay Power a kind of posing. But looking at that footage from 1971 made me understand more clearly that the nascent tribe of liberationists, gay liberationists, was also constructing new set of relations between love, sex and politics. Because the expression of love, sexual desire, queer sexuality was under constraint, love, sexual desire, the expression of queer sexuality was a tool of our resistance. Fucking was not ancillary to our politics, not a libidinal excess to the liberation work, it was totally integral to it. Living this queer love was a strategy toward being able to be and live as “ our true selves” and also a strategy toward overthrowing the violent oppression of heteronormativity. That is why those bodies taking to the streets in 1971 were so particularly threatening and vulnerable.

When I looked again at those images of that vulnerable becoming-tribe that wasn’t quite sure if it would make it to the end of the event, to Central Park, I realized how wisely they exerted their precise power to fuck and to love, to chant about loving and fucking, to dress one’s best, to look beautiful, to strut and twirl and shake and kick, to seduce the camera, seduce the public, seduce the homophobe.

It is this relationship between love and politics that I am interested in re-inserting into the current dialogue about queerness and politics in 2008.

SO…not the whole story but a beginning point so you know a bit more about where I’m coming from. Thank you a ton for being game to join a little band of queers to make/re-make a little revolution!

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As Minneapolis inaugurates the third largest annual Pride Festival in the country this weekend, New York based artist Sharon Hayes is visiting the Twin Cities to launch Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy, a public performance that will involve 70-100 local participants coming together to publicly demonstrate the relationship between love and politics […]

As Minneapolis inaugurates the third largest annual Pride Festival in the country this weekend, New York based artist Sharon Hayes is visiting the Twin Cities to launch Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy, a public performance that will involve 70-100 local participants coming together to publicly demonstrate the relationship between love and politics during the 2008 Republican National Convention (September 1-4).

In the spirit of Stonewall-era gay liberation movements, Hayes plans to intervene at both the Democratic National Convention in Denver, CO, and the Republican National Convention in Minneapolis, MN by instigating readings of texts that address the relationship between political and personal desire, and queer issues, by 75 to 100 people in unison. Blending the techniques of performance art and political rallies, her work addresses the complex historic construction of love and politics.

This weekend and throughout the summer Hayes will be recruiting volunteers to take part in the performance this September. Please tell your friends, relatives, gaybours, and anyone this sounds right for – it’s an ambitious project and we need a lot of people to realize it. On one day during the Convention (September 1-4), approximately 70-100 people will speak a text about love, politics, gay power, and gay liberation, written by Hayes for the occasion. We are looking for volunteer performers to recite (as a chorus) a 10–15 minute text, repeated multiple times over a period of approximately two hours. The performance will take place in a public space in proximity to the Convention (Creative Time will send you more details once the site is confirmed).

To be part of the project you need to submit the following information by email to rnc@creativetime.org:

1. Contact information: Phone (home/cell) & e-mail address

2. Do you have any additional resources that you would like to bring to the project?

3. Are you affiliated with any organizations that would be interested in spreading the word?

4. Do you have any technical or stage management skills?

As a participating performer, we are asking that you:

Attend one rehearsal to practice delivering the spoken text with other performers, to be held approximately 3-4 days before the performance and directed by Hayes. (Note: you will be given a choice of multiple rehearsal dates/times, and asked to attend the one that best fits your schedule.

Memorize the 10-15 minute text in advance of the first rehearsal.

Agree to be recorded and depicted in video, sound, and photographic documentation of the project (you will be asked to sign an image release form).

Sharon Hayes has produced challenging work in performance, video, and installation for over a decade. Staging protests, delivering speeches, and organizing demonstrations, she creates interventions that highlight the friction between collective activities and personal actions. Employing the artistic and academic methodologies of theater, film, anthropology, linguistics, and journalism, Hayes has made work that engages history, politics, and public space. She was an artist in PERFORMA05 and her work has been shown at the New Museum, P.S. 1/MoMA, Art In General, Artists Space, Parlour Projects, Andrew Kreps Gallery, Dance Theater Workshop, Performance Space 122, the Joseph Papp Public Theater, and the WOW Café in NYC. In addition she has shown at the Tate Modern in London, Museum Moderner Kunst and the Generali Foundation in Vienna, at many other national and international exhibition spaces, as well as in 45 lesbian living rooms across the United States. Her collaborative piece, 9 Scripts from a Nation at War, showed in Documenta 12 in Kassel, Germany this past June.

Revolutionary Love 2: I Am Your Best Fantasy is the second in a two-part project by Hayes taking place at both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions. The first performance, which will take place at the DNC, is titled Revolutionary Love 1: I Am Your Worst Fear.

Revolutionary Love 2 is presented by Creative Time with the Walker Art Center and the UnConvention as part of Creative Time’s 2008 national public art initiative Democracy in America: The National Campaign.